You may have trouble if the drive letter changes, lots of parameters in Mercury setup require a full path.

You can set the assigned drive letter in the 'Disk Management' snapin in MMC. This will need to be done on each 'new' machine.

You should set it to a "high" letter (X,Y,or Z) so there is more chance of the drive letter being available on any particular machine. (E, F & so on are commonly grabbed by extra HDD's or DVD drives, camera's etc).

Or maybe M: would be more appropriate [:D] 

I have an application where I'd like Mercury to be installed on a USB drive.

As long as I manually start and stop it, is there any reason this wouldn't work ?

Sure.  Mercury/32 would not be capable of receiving via MercuryS without jumping through some hoops but it's not really all that much of a problem.

"hoops" ? Hmmmm...sounds omnious.

It's been a while since I used Mercury and this application will be very simple (just a mailing list for a club I'm involved with) but if I recall correctly, I do use the MercuryS module.

The concept is that if I install Mercury onto a USB drive then I don't have to be the one to host it forever and ever. In principle, I could pull the drive and stick it into someone else's server and let them host it -without losing any files or config info.

What kind of 'hoops' are we talking about ?

Much appreciated.

MercuryS is a passive host, it receives mail from external sources by binding port 25 (default) to listen for incoming mail.  The problem is that the IP address of the system you are using is going to be always changing and so you'll only be able to consistanly connect to this port via the localhost (or 127.0.0.1) address. The only real way to send mail to a user on this setup would be user@[127.0.0.1].  This would not be a particular problem if you only use Mercury/32 for sending from a POP3 or IMAP4 client on this USB drive since you could use the fixed 127.0.0.1 as the host.

MercuryS will by default listen on all available network interfaces when started, so that will work automatically if you move to another computer. You will probably need to modify some other settings, though. Local domains in Core configuration should have the correct host name and IP, and you will need to make the new IP address of the server known to be able to get error notifications and other messages (by a DNS change normally).

/Rolf 

Ah, but in this applicatoin there are no local users ! It simply POPs into a domain mailbox on an ISP's mail server, collects all mail for "maiser", processes the requests and then SMTPs the results.

I think this will work !

Thanks Thomas.